Jim Myers
My
journey to discovering the Real Yeshua
began in 1980. I believe that if you know more about my journey it will help
you understand what I write in our newsletters, blogs, groups, etc. My approach
is very different from how others view this subject – many are either defending their positions or attacking someone else’s.
I completely understand both positions and have engaged in both over the years.
The problem, from my point of view, is that either of those options usually polarizes
people and creates environments that make cooperation and respect impossible. My journey has led me to discover ways that brings
people together to more accurately understand the past that has produced the
present and to include those facts as they consider their future.
Let
me begin by telling you about the two most difficult obstacles that I
repeatedly encountered on my journey -- my
subconscious mind and my Belief System. The subconscious mind acts like a
firewall on a computer and screens out information that does not support the
information in its memory -- and we are
not even aware of the fact that our subconscious mind is doing it. As an
information processor -- the subconscious
mind is one million times more powerful than the self-conscious mind.[i] The bottom line is that we are wired to
move away from and avoid things that we do not believe or consider to be true –
even when what we believe to be true is
completely false!
So,
when I began this part of my life in 1980, my mind was not a blank slate – it was loaded with information, beliefs and
truths I had acquired before. This will give you a quick overview of some
of the life experiences that created important memories for me. My father was a
nurseryman who loved plants. He was an excellent teacher who taught me how to
germinate, cross-pollinate, graft, make cuttings, pot, ball, can and do all
sorts of other things with plants and trees. He made me aware of how nature and
seasonal cycles affect life. The United States Air Force trained me to be a
surgery and radiology technician and was where I witnessed lives being saved
and lost. My professional career was in banking and finance. I am a graduate of the School of Banking of the South at Louisiana State University (Graduate School of Banking at LSU today).
I learned about the power of money, how it is created and how it is used to
control lives. And, I was raised as a Baptist, required to attend to church
every Sunday (morning and evening services) while I lived with my parents, was saved
when I was thirteen and after I graduated from high school no longer attended
church. These experiences not only produced lots of memories, they also gave me
a unique way of understanding many things in life – from the point of view of being an insider – that most people do
not have – agriculture, military,
medical, banking, and as you will see next, religion. So, as you can see, my
mind was not a blank slate in 1980.
1980 – I was at a
critical juncture in my life, as the result of a personal crisis; I reexamined
my life and made the decision to recommit my life to God. I became actively involved
in a nondenominational church and soon felt that I was called to go into the
ministry. I enrolled in a Bible College and classes were to begin that
September. In August, I purchased a new Bible and while sitting at my kitchen
table, I opened it and prayed, “Please show
me what I need to know.” Instantly, this came into my mind:
“Unless you know how words work you cannot
understand one word of the Bible.”
My
first thought was – What does that mean?
Then, I brushed it aside.
1981 – One of my
most important beliefs at that time was this:
The Bible –
meaning an English translation – is the inerrant and infallible Word of God. Every
word is the literal Word of God and the Bible has every answer for every
question a person could ever face in life.
This
will probably sound strange to those who know me now, but back then I did not know
this:
The original words of the books in my Bible were
written in Greek or Hebrew – not English!
One
of the books we were required to purchase for classes was Strong’s Concordance. It was then that I remembered -- “Unless you know how words work you cannot
understand one word of the Bible.” I knew I had to learn more about Greek and
Hebrew to understand the words of my Bible. The Bible College didn’t offer any
courses, so I enrolled in correspondent courses in Biblical Greek and Hebrew
from another Bible school at the same time.
1982 – I discovered
a set of interlinear Bibles at the
college bookstore that had the Greek and Hebrew texts with English words
beneath them and the Strong’s Concordance
reference number. It felt like I was in heaven. I love to analyze things. One
of my banking skills was analyzing financial statements, so I guess my
subconscious mind simply did what it had been trained to do – but did it with biblical texts instead of
financial statements. It soon identified a familiar pattern:
Bible
translators often had more than one option for translating Greek and Hebrew
words. They chose one and rejected others, which their readers never know. And
then, sometimes they translate Greek and Hebrew words one way in one verse and another
was in other verses.
My
Belief System did not like what I was discovering and my subconscious mind was
trying to filter out a lot of things that were challenging my beliefs. If it
hadn’t been for my desire to understand how words work my Belief System might
have won.
1984 – I was now the
minister of a church I founded in my home town. It was affiliated with the Bible
College and we were one of the first to use cutting edge satellite technology. People
enrolled in the Bible College, but attended classes at my church. The satellite
network grew to include over a 1,000 churches spread around the world -- my church was #20. Things were going
pretty well.
But then I received “the” letter and that changed everything. It
was an advertisement for a new book -- Understanding the Difficult Words of Jesus by David Bivin & Roy
Blizzard. Guess which two words in the title jumped out at me – understanding & words. I immediately
ordered it. When it came I finished the entire book the same day and added this
to my Belief System:
Jesus
was a Jew. To accurately understand his words we must view them from the
perspective of his Jewish culture. I call this “seeing his words through his
eyes.”
I was beginning to understand the importance of the answer to my
1980 prayer, but now I knew I had to really focus on finding out how words
worked! The closest university library was at a Seventh Day Adventists
university and that was where I decided to camp out until I had the answer. I
never dreamed it would be three month camping trip. During the first
month, I was literally there when the doors opened, and except for a lunch
break, I stayed there for the remainder of the work day.
Armed with my new information about the Jewish Jesus, my first
goal was to learn as much as possible about his Jewish culture. The very first day
I discovered the Encyclopedia Judaica -- it was like
discovering gold! I spent days studying words like righteousness, sin, repentance, forgiveness, holy, salvation, God,
mashiach (messiah), etc. My
Belief System was being turned upside down because I believed -- salvation was based on believing IN Jesus, but I was beginning to
realize that the Jesus I believed IN
wasn’t the Jewish Jesus I was learning about.
This definitely created a BS
Crisis – BS stands for Belief System. I now knew there
were two different figures named Jesus in my mind -- one was a Protestant Christian Jesus and the other was the Jewish Jesus.
Later I learned there were many more versions of Jesus out there too. What
should I do next? I knew the answer was tied to learning more about how words work. So, I moved from the
Jewish section of the library to linguistic section and spent a week there. It
was then that I formulated what I call “The
Law of Language”:
A
word is a symbol or group of symbols with an attached bundle of associations.
Those associations are the product of the Source's culture,
historical time period, geographical location and personal experience.
Those associations are the product of the Source's culture,
historical time period, geographical location and personal experience.
There are two parties involved in a communications experience are
a Source & Receptor.
(1) Source – the one sending the message (author or speaker).
(2) Receptor – the one receiving the message (reader or hearer).
In order for them to have a successful communications experience
they must both share the same “bundles of
associations” (meanings) for the words of the message. When it comes to words
written in the Bible, we can’t go ask the Source what his words mean. It is
the responsibility is on the Receptor to do his or her best to learn as much as
possible about the Source’s language, culture, geographical location,
historical time period, and personal experiences. When I applied this to
the Jewish Jesus, this is what I discovered:
(1) symbols -- languages – Hebrew & Aramaic
(2) culture - Second Temple Jewish culture
(3) historical time period -- 6 BCE – 30 CE
(4) geographical locations -- Galilee, Samaria & Judea
(5) personal experiences – a few childhood experiences
recorded in Bible, but most adult experiences are related to his activities as
a rabbi and teacher
While working on this, a nagging thought sidetracked me. My church
was located in a small town with a population of around 25,000 -- and it had over 100 churches. They
didn’t work together and most seemed to be in competition against each other. The
nagging question was this -- How did the single
movement of Jesus produce the hundred churches in my town that never worked
together? This required a move over to the history section in the library.
The first things I found were the 38 volumes of the Ante-Nicene Fathers (writings of the early church fathers). Reading
the writings of Christian leaders from the second through fourth centuries was
an eye-opening experience. It didn’t take long to realize that two questions caused
a great deal of conflict among early Christian groups:
(1) What was Jesus (God, man or something else)?
(2) What was his mission (save the world, create a new religion, etc.)?
I also discovered Philip Schaff’s eight-volume History of the Christian Church. Something
was becoming very clear:
Christianity had consisted of groups that disagreed
and were in conflict with one another – and with Judaism – beginning just a few
years after the crucifixion of Jesus. As the movement spread from Israel to
foreign lands, members from those cultures began to interpret the Greek
translations of the words of Jesus based on what those words meant to them long
before they heard of Jesus. They knew nothing of his Jewish culture, and many
looked down on anything Jewish. A group of new Jesus figures emerged that
reflected the cultures of Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Africans, Babylonians, etc.
1985 – I
knew that the information I now needed required more than a trip to the
library, so I enrolled in the University of Texas at Arlington and completed
classes in Hebrew, Classical Greek, Roman
History, Greek History, Linguistics, and others that I needed to fill in
the blanks.
1987 -- Dr.
Ike Tennison was my professor for one of the courses in Classical Greek. Ike
soon became an important partner in my work and a very good friend. Ike made me
aware of something else that would change the way I studied the words of my
Bible -- there are approximately 5,800
Greek New Testament manuscripts that are currently known.[ii]
Of
those 5,800+ Greek New Testament manuscripts, no two are identical. Not only
must translators choose which English word they will use as the translation of
a Greek on an ancient manuscript – they must decide which Greek word from all
of those manuscripts is the one that should be translated.
I also learned that no original manuscript of any of book of the
New Testament or Jewish Scriptures exists. The earliest manuscripts of the New
Testament books were copied three hundred years or more after Jesus spoke them.
He did not write down his teachings. What we have are copies of copies of
copies of accounts made by others of what he said and did – thousands of copies!
In addition to discovering that thousands of ancient manuscripts
existed, I also discovered that there were other New Testaments that had
different books than mine -- other
Gospels, Epistles and Revelations. Many had been Scriptures for earlier
Christians. My version of the New Testament didn’t appear until the middle of
the fourth century and wouldn’t be translated into English for another thousand
years.
1988 – Keep in mind
that I was still pastoring a church while all of this was going on! It does
create a challenge when you are preparing a sermon. It also created some very interesting
Bible studies and heated discussions. I realized I needed to come up with a way
to defuse these situations and bring people together instead of polarizing them.
The first thing realized was that people were not making a distinction between opinions, beliefs, truths & facts. Some people get just as mad over
their opinion being challenged as they do over a truth be challenged. So, I
asked them to let each other know what they were defending:
●
A belief
is a judgment in which trust or confidence is placed, although without
absolute proof that one is right in doing so.[iv]
●
A truth is a judgment, proposition, or idea that, in accordance with
a standard, is accepted as real or the state of being the case.[v]
This
was an eye-opener for many people. We soon realized that we all had standards
that we were using that determined the above categories. We also discovered that those standards would produce conflicting
truths-- two truths could be polar opposites and still be truths! This is the way the world operated for tens of
thousands of years, but things changed when the Scientific Revolution introduced a new standard -- facts.
A fact has the quality of being actual;
something that has actual existence; an actual occurrence [vi]
A fact is verifiable.[vii]
Facts
are verifiable by anyone, regardless of their Belief Systems. No matter what
one believed about their Bible – the facts
are that thousands of manuscripts and many canons exist that different.
This was when I created the Guiding
Principle for Bible Study:
My beliefs will
be large enough to include all of the facts;
open enough to be tested; and, flexible enough to change when error or new facts are discovered.
The
introduction of facts in our studies and conversations changed things. We all
understood these facts:
(1) There are hundreds of English translations
of Bibles and they differ.
(2) Jewish, Roman Catholic and Protestant Bibles
do not contain all of the same books.
(3) There are thousands of ancient Greek and
Hebrew manuscripts for the books in the different Bibles and they differ.
When
different positions came forth we identified whether they were opinions, beliefs, truths or facts. We then searched for facts
together that are related to our study. Everyone was prepared to consider
whatever answer came forth in light of existing facts. This brought members of
the group together to look for facts. We wanted to understand the development
of the differing positions, instead of blindly defending whatever we believed
.
1990 – Shortly after
my first grandson was born, I was sitting in my study reading a magazine when I
flipped a page and saw this picture:
My
eyes locked on the soles of the two
little tennis shoes between the two bodies on the left. I assumed the
child wearing those shoes was lying between its parents. I couldn’t take
my eyes off the shoes in the picture and then this thought seemed to explode in
my mind:
What is so
powerful that it would cause a loving mother to place a glass of poison
to the lips of her baby, look into its eyes, and tell it to drink?
to the lips of her baby, look into its eyes, and tell it to drink?
This
answer immediately followed -- It was her
religious belief system!
How had a religious belief become more powerful
than a mother’s instinct to protect the life of her
child?
And
then I thought about Jim Jones and me – we
were both Christians; we were both minister; and, we both used our Bible as the
authority for our beliefs. We both did a lot of things that sounded very
much alike. How could I make sure I would never do or teach anything that could
cost another child its life – like that
little child in the picture?
Facts
are important, but most of time we base our decisions on beliefs simply because
we don’t have the facts. Our minds are belief processing engines that operate
most of the time on the powerful subconscious level – completely above the level of our conscious awareness. I knew it
was essential for me to become aware of what it was doing, so I began keeping a
BS Log to record beliefs that were
affecting my life. It was an eye-opening experience. It didn’t take long to discover
exactly how much of my life was controlled by my religious beliefs – they affected my relationships with others
(believers yes & unbelievers no), how I used my time (going to church,
reading my Bible, praying, evangelizing, etc.), how I spent my money (tithing,
donating, buying books, etc.) what I believed was right or wrong (according to
the unknown standard), and much more. I never realized how powerful my
religious beliefs were – but I placed a
picture of those little shoes on the BHC website Homepage to make sure I didn’t
forget!
It
was during this period that I was asked to become chaplain at the local law
enforcement center by the sheriff. This brought me in contact with a world that
I was completely unaware of before. It also placed me an interesting place,
when it came to religion. I was in charge of scheduling where visiting
ministers and priests would preach every week in the jail. There were three
rooms of male inmates and one for female inmates. I quickly discovered that
every Monday there were a lot of requests from inmates that were linked to the
previous day sermons. Keep in mind that they were hearing different ministers
every week -- Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals,
Seventh Day Adventists, Catholic, etc. The requests were usually questions about
which one was right! So, I decided to put the monkey on the visiting ministers’
backs. Instead of sending ministers from the same denominations into the same
room, I mixed them up. Now, with Pentecostal, Baptist, Methodist and Seventh
Day Adventist ministers standing before them, the inmates could ask them their
questions instead of me. The sheriff received more than a few complaints from
the ministers and a lot of “thank you notes” from the inmates. He thought it
was a good plan, too.
It
was also during this period that I co-founded an alcohol and drug
rehabilitation program called Helping
Open Peoples Eyes – HOPE! Working on this project was
very revealing in many ways. One thing I learned through my research was that
most of the inmates in the program began taking drugs between the ages of
thirteen and seventeen. This has been a strong motivation for me to be involved
in youth sports programs ever since. Another factor that affected a lot of the
lives of the inmates was their religious beliefs and the related guilt.
1996 – I read The New Science of the Meme by Richard
Brodie and was introduced to “memes.”
A meme is a unit
of information in a mind whose existence influences events such that more
copies of it are created in other minds.
Our
brain is like the hardware of a computer and memes are like the software. It is
through memes that we assign meaning to things and create strategies and
associations related to those meanings. Opinions,
beliefs and truths are memes and just like genes they have histories that can
be tracked from one generation to the next. Just as we have genealogies, we also have our memealogies too. Understanding this
completely changes the way we deal with religious, political and economic
conflicts. The first thing everyone around the table must do is – show us your memes!
2010 – I became
aware of the TOV Standard. The
Hebrew word TOV appears seven times in
the first chapter of Genesis – the TOV Standard
the Creator used to measure His actions. TOV is usually translated “good”
in the Bible, but “good” is a very
subjective word that can mean different things to different people. Below is
the contextual meaning of TOV:
For something to
be TOV it must protect life, preserve life, make life more functional and
improve the quality of life.
Once
we understand that the above is what “good” meant to the Creator, then we can
also understand what RA, which is
translated “evil” meant to Him:
For something to
be RA it must destroy or harm life, threaten life, make life less functional
and diminish the quality of life.
I
hope this helps you understand me and what’s behind my words. Keep in mind the
lessons I learned above as you read my articles, blogs and newsletters. Use
them in your studies and in your groups. Know, that if you are a pastor or
minister, I understand the challenges you face. Let me know if there is
anything I can do to help you. If you would like to share your thoughts or
comments, please email them to me by clicking here.
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Thank
you for taking time to read this.
Shalom,
Jim
Myers
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